The first openly gay actress to win a Tony, Cherry Jones finds her calling as Sister Aloysius in the national tour of Doubt.

By Christopher Wallenberg

Although it didn't unfold on the annual Academy Awards telecast, the acclaimed theater and film actress Cherry Jones was still going where no lesbian had gone before when she stood on the stage of the Minskoff Theatre during the 1995 Tony Awards telecast and thanked her longtime romantic partner in her acceptance speech after she won the Tony for best actress in a play for her performance in The Heiress. That day, Jones, who had been out since the beginning of her career, became the first openly lesbian actress to ever win a Tony.

“I didn't give it a second thought. It was the most natural thing in the world—I am just fortunate to have come along when I did, [when], certainly in the theater, it's the most natural thing in the world to be out, out, out. Maybe not in Hollywood, but I don't live in Hollywood,” says Jones, during a phone interview to promote the national tour of John Patrick Shanley's Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning play Doubt, in which she plays a ballbusting, iron-willed Catholic school nun who suspects a priest of inappropriate behavior with a young male student.

When Jones nabbed her second best actress Tony in 2005 for her performance in Doubt, she got a congratulatory kiss on the lips from her girlfriend, actress Sarah Paulson (Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, Deadwood), as six million television viewers looked on.

To Jones, however, any attention has seemed unwarranted. She doesn't see any of her actions as groundbreaking. “I just think I came along too late to be a trailblazer,” she says, with a warm laugh. “Maybe if it were 1968. But it was not. It was 1995. And 2005.”

Those small public displays of affection may have been insignificant to most people who were watching on TV, but to some gay and lesbian commentators, these moments were still important steps in furthering gay and lesbian visibility in society.

Despite her reluctance to be branded as any kind of pioneer, Jones has been outspoken on various LGBT issues over the years. She starred opposite Brooke Shields in the 2001 Lifetime television movie What Makes a Family, based on the true story of a Florida lesbian mother's fight to maintain custody of her child after the death of her partner. And in 2003, GLAAD honored her with the Vito Russo Award, presented annually to an openly queer entertainment or media figure for their outstanding contributions to eliminating homophobia.

While Jones has earned praise for being a leading light for gay and lesbian visibility in the entertainment world, the 49-year-old actress has earned even more kudos for her illuminating and transformative stage work over the past several decades. Since the career-changing title role in The Heiress put her on the radar of most New York theater-goers more than 10 years ago, critics have showered her with effusive praise in plays ranging from Tennessee Williams' The Night of the Iguana to Eugene O'Neill's A Moon for the Misbegotten to Tina Howe's Pride's Crossing, calling her performances “radiant,” “luminous” and other such superlatives. Her protean ability to find the soul of her characters and to so completely disappear into each role is why she is considered, by many observers, to be one of the great leading ladies of the American stage.

So why is this splendid actress, a woman who could no doubt have her pick of parts on the New York stage, eschewing the comforts of her home in the Big Apple in order to head out to the hinterlands on a national tour? (Doubt plays the Ahmanson Theatre through Oct. 29.)

“I think if I heard that anybody else was going out on tour with it, for the first time in my life I would have felt professional jealousy,” she says, with a laugh. “I didn't want to share it with anybody. I'm not usually so greedy—I'm really not. But with this one, I felt greedy.”

That hunger is certainly understandable. When Doubt landed off-Broadway in the fall of 2004, it was swiftly declared by the cognoscenti to be a landmark in American drama. Written by John Patrick Shanley (Moonstruck, Danny and the Deep Blue Sea) and set in the Bronx in 1964, the play is a battle of wills between the rigid, bespectacled, bonnet-clad Sister Aloysius and a charismatic young priest, Father Flynn, who the nun suspects of molesting a young schoolboy in his care. Although the story echoes a ripped-from-the-headlines subject, Doubt is not explicitly about the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church. Instead, Shanley uses the charged topic to create a parable exploring ideas of truth and certainty.

As the taut, riveting drama unfolds, its central conflict becomes a battle for the audience's sympathies. Is Father Flynn guilty? Or is Sister Aloysius on a misguided witch-hunt? Even more provocatively, the play functions as a sort of critique of the Bush administration and its own staunch, go-it-alone certainty in its pursuit of a muscular and controversial foreign policy in the wake of Sept. 11.

“It plays with the audience in that they're pulled back-and-forth and back-and-forth between these two arguments,” says Jones. “And I think, at the end, the audience is sort of wiped out, but usually pretty certain about what it is they believe as they leave the theater. And they're often astonished that the people they entered the theater with see it in a completely different light. People actually leave in deep battles, sometimes. It's just a wonderful play for this country to be chewing on right now.”

The passionate reactions that the play elicits from audience members can be both illuminating and sometimes shocking, says Jones. In her nearly 30-year acting career, the actress says that she's never been involved with any other play that got people so riled up.

“The people who hate her just hate her. One night, as the lights went out on my final lines of the play, this woman on the front row calmly declared, ‘May she burn in hell,’ recalls Jones, with a laugh. “Then I've also gotten many notes—one in particular—where this man wrote, 'Oh if only I'd had a Sister Aloysius when I was a boy. I needed her.'… And that's the thing. It's the baggage that the audience brings into the theater that, I think, determines what their response to the piece is going to be more than what we do up there. It’s almost like a Rorschach test.”

Doubt: A Parable plays the Ahmanson Theatre in Los Angeles through Oct. 29 and the Civic Theatre in San Diego from Oct. 31 through Nov. 5.